Looking for a new database for your data-intensive application? Don’t miss our new research paper revealing performance test results for Cassandra, MongoDB, and Couchbase Server.

4 things to consider when choosing a NoSQL DB

Designed to replace traditional RDBMS, NoSQL databases provide near-endless scalability and great performance for data-intensive use cases. However, with so many different options around, choosing the right NoSQL database for an interactive web app can be tricky. In general, the most important factors to keep in mind are:

1. Scalability. It is hard to predict when your application needs to scale, but when the website traffic suddenly spikes and a database does not have enough capacity, you need to scale quickly, on demand, and without any application changes. Similarly, when your system is idle, you should have a possibility to decrease the amount of resources used. Scaling your database must be a simple operation—you should not need to deal with complicated procedures or make any changes to the code.

2. Performance. Interactive applications require very low read and write latencies. The database must deliver consistently low latencies regardless of load or the size of data. As a rule, the read and write latencies of NoSQL databases are very low because data is shared across all nodes in a cluster while the application’s working set is in memory.

3. Availability. Interactive web applications need a highly available database. If your application is down, you are simply losing money. To ensure high availability, your solution should be able to do online upgrades and easily remove a node for maintenance without affecting the availability of the cluster. It also should handle online operations, such as backups, and provide disaster recovery, if the entire data center goes down.

4. Ease of development. Relational databases require a rigid schema and, if your application changes, the database schema needs to change, as well. In this regard, NoSQL databases offer a number of important advantages that make it possible to alter a data structure without affecting your application.

Performance results

To help you select the best option for your use case, Dmitriy Kalyada, an R&D engineer at Altoros, has analyzed and explained the most important pros and cons identified for each data store under different types of workload. You can learn how the tree most mature open source NoSQL DBs address the four key considerations for interactive applications. In addition, the white paper provides precise data on infrastructure, settings, and workload types used for the benchmarking.

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About Altoros

Altoros is a 300+ people strong consultancy that helps Global 2000 organizations with a methodology, training, technology building blocks, and end-to-end solution development. The company turns cloud-native app development, customer analytics, blockchain, and AI into products with a sustainable competitive advantage. Altoros assists enterprises on their way to digital transformation, standing behind some of the world's largest Cloud Foundry deployments.